Developing Content Knowledge and Literacy Skills in Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Environments

Developing Literacy in K-12 History, Social Sciences and Language Arts: Content Knowledge and Strategies for Teachers to Support Learning Standards for Students.A conference for ALL teachers!Conference Program(pdf)

Dr. Bruce Fehn

Keynote

Dr. Bruce Fehn provided the keynote address. Dr. Fehn taught grades 6-12 social studies for many years and was eventually drawn to work with preservice teachers. He is passionate in his belief that future teachers must understand both the power of race, gender and class and have knowledge of effective teaching strategies that probe these issues. A successful author, Dr. Fehn has published in the areas of women’s history, labor history and black history. Last summer he published “Selective Appropriation and Historical Documentary Making in a Special Education Classroom” in Social Studies Research and Practice. Dr. Fehn epitomizes the multidimensional persona of a teacher with diverse work in history and social issues, effective teaching practices, supporting needs of special education students, technology and more. His current project, that he shared in his keynote address, is a multi-media book on the history of African-American Medal of Honor winners during WWII.

Diana Hess is the Senior Vice President of the Spencer Foundation and a professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former high school teacher and associate director of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago, Hess earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington-Seattle. Since 1997, she has been researching how teachers engage their students in discussions of highly controversial political and constitutional issues, and what impact this approach to civic education has on what young people learn. Her first book on this topic, Controversy in the Classroom: The Democratic Power of Discussion won the National Council for the Social Studies Exemplary Research Award in 2009.

Paula McAvoy is an Associate Program Officer at the Spencer Foundation. She earned her doctorate in philosophy of education from the department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include: democratic education, cultural and religious accommodation, and the ethics of teaching about politics. These interests were largely formed by her experiences teaching high school social studies in California for ten years.

ICSS Spring 2014 Conference Keynote SpeakerDr. James W. Loewen

“The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.” ― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

James Loewen grew up in Decatur, Illinois. He is a sociologist who spent two years at the Smithsonian surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history only to find an embarrassing blend of bland optimism, blind nationalism, and plain misinformation, weighing in at an average of 888 pages and almost five pounds. A best-selling author who wrote Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong. A researcher who discovered that many, and in many states most communities were "Sundown Towns" that kept out blacks (and sometimes other groups) for decades. (Some still do.) An educator who attended Carleton College, holds the Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University, and taught race relations for twenty years at the University of Vermont.